Listenin' to Prince

[chvrchbarrel]

Other than our journey through Margaritaville, it's been awhile since there have been any discog runs posted on the board. I wanted to pick someone with an expansive catalog also worth listening to and also worth plenty of discussion...cue Prince.



I want to at least make it through 1999 (for the obvious themed reason but also because it takes you all the way up through the love-symbol period), and if I’m not completely burned out after that I’ll keep going through the end. So I guess you could call this Part I. That would include...

For You (1978)
Prince (1979)
Dirty Mind (1980)
Controversy (1981)
1999 (1982)
Purple Rain (1984)
Around the World in a Day (1985)
Parade (1986)
Sign O the Times (1987)
Lovesexy (1988)
Batman (1989)
Graffiti Bridge (1990)
Diamonds and Pearls (1991)
Love Symbol (1992)
Come (1994)
The Black Album (1994)
The Gold Experience (1995)
Chaos and Disorder (1996)
Emancipation (1996)
The Truth (1998)
Crystal Ball (1998)
The Vault - Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999)


There is no rhyme, reason, or schedule to how this will progress. I don’t want rigid week-long discussion periods for this to just continuously fizzle out, so we'll just improvise and discuss as we go. There are 23 albums listed above...this will not be a 23 week project.
Sometimes I think we shoot ourselves in the foot with project schedules. 


Really hope some will join in here and there and make this more than just me typing into the void about Prince.



Purple Rain, Parade, and Graffiti Bridge discussions will be accompanied by film screenings of their counterparts. I might also watch Batman but that would mostly just be to watch Batman.


Xamnam this thread probably belongs in Band Discussions but I wanted to start it here for a little higher visibility and hopefully participation.

I have never listened to For You before so I'm going to dive right in today and I invite all of you to join me.

[zircona1]

The first two albums are kind of spotty - Dirty Mind is his first great one, FWIW

[chvrchbarrel]

Feb 24, 2020 10:00:36 GMT -6 zircona1 said:

The first two albums are kind of spotty - Dirty Mind is his first great one, FWIW

I don't mind the self titled one but Dirty Mind through Purple Rain is one of the greatest album runs of all time.

[Xamnam]

Feb 24, 2020 9:58:02 GMT -6 chvrchbarrel said:

There is no rhyme, reason, or schedule to how this will progress. I don’t want rigid week-long discussion periods for this to just continuously fizzle out, so we'll just improvise and discuss as we go. There are 23 albums listed above...this will not be a 23 week project.
Sometimes I think we shoot ourselves in the foot with project schedules. 

Finally someone realizes it.

[neader]

I'll try to stick around until Sign O the Times.

[chvrchbarrel]

Feb 24, 2020 10:07:01 GMT -6 neader said:

I'll try to stick around until Sign O the Times.

But see that defeats the purpose, you are going to miss a lot of honestly great stuff from after that if you just bail after the ones you already know

[neader]

well now I'm not participating, have fun talking to yourself!!!

[clouddead]

“Bob George” is an all time classic song.

[alady]

I'm in - despite having a very deep and visceral love for Prince I do have more than a few blind spots in his discography.

[andrewvb]

no rigid rules, but dont you dare stop listening after whatever album you choose.

lol

[chvrchbarrel]

Feb 24, 2020 10:45:16 GMT -6 andrewvb said:

no rigid rules, but dont you dare stop listening after whatever album you choose.

lol

my next board project is going to be a ranking of your sassy criticisms of other peoples threads

[andrewvb]

Feb 24, 2020 11:04:25 GMT -6 chvrchbarrel said:

Feb 24, 2020 10:45:16 GMT -6 andrewvb said:

no rigid rules, but dont you dare stop listening after whatever album you choose.

lol

my next board project is going to be a ranking of your sassy criticisms of other peoples threads

continuing neader's joke was very rude, i apologize. i'm planning on listening to the prince albums anyway.

[teekoh]

In the spirit of this thread I have started For You and will stop halfway through track 7.

[chvrchbarrel]

For You (1978)

Starting in October, the basic tracks were recorded over three months at the Record Plant. Vicari tried to exert his influence as producer but Prince shrugged off any advice that was contrary to his wishes.

Prince worked obsessively on the project, singing all vocals and playing all instruments, including acoustic, electric, and bass guitar; acoustic and Fender Rhodes piano; synth bass; various keyboard synths by Oberheim, Moog, and Arp; orchestra bells; drums and percussion. He used the Oberheim to provide the sound of a horn section, but with guitar lines layered into the mix.

The basic tracks were finished in late December 1977. Husney later observed that Prince had drained Vicari during the recording process, such that Vicari was "heartbroken" because he had just been "treated like shit".

-Wikipedia

whenever i reminisce about lazy saturdays in the 70s at my grandmother’s house the musical backdrop is always the opening 8 bars of “my love is forever”—even though this album wasn’t in my childhood at the time of its release, somehow this is what i think about when i think about those days when my parents were on the road. sunny. isolated. pancakes. dust. plastic couch covers. memories. steady start.

-Questlove

[chvrchbarrel]

I don't think I know a single song from this but For You > In Love is a pretty solid start.

[zircona1]

Oh wait I guess I've never listened to For You - I should correct that.

[teekoh]

I would listen to an album of just these bass lines. Also, Prince doing a sort of bossa nova thing on "Crazy You" was kinda wild.

I will say that there are times when it seems like this record was dangerously close to being a Kool and the Gang album.

[thebosma]

Feb 24, 2020 11:04:25 GMT -6 chvrchbarrel said:

Feb 24, 2020 10:45:16 GMT -6 andrewvb said:

no rigid rules, but dont you dare stop listening after whatever album you choose.

lol

my next board project is going to be a ranking of your sassy criticisms of other peoples threads

Respect the lol rules chvrch

[chvrchbarrel]

Feb 24, 2020 11:34:17 GMT -6 teekoh said:

I would listen to an album of just these bass lines. Also, Prince doing a sort of bossa nova thing on "Crazy You" was kinda wild.

I will say that there are times when it seems like this record was dangerously close to being a Kool and the Gang album.

it is surprisingly versatile but i guess i also didn't know prince was telling producers to more or less fuck off from the get-go, so it makes sense that its mostly him just playing around

[chvrchbarrel]

This is fucking great

[teekoh]

Yeah, it's an album of overall pretty pleasant and inoffensive pop-funk, and then the closer just blows the doors off. Loved it.

[nanatod]

Feb 24, 2020 10:45:16 GMT -6 andrewvb said:

no rigid rules, but dont you dare stop listening after whatever album you choose.

lol

I started and stopped listening after 1999 came out in 1982.  But I did go see him in the round at the rosemizon with Sheila D on drums in fall of '88, on a Saturday night, after a Friday night where I saw Elton at Poplar Creek, but because of the traffic, got there too late to see Elton's opening act, wet wet wet.

[alady]

If y'all don't fuck with Soft and Wet I don't know what

[teekoh]

Yeah, that was another highlight.

[chvrchbarrel]

Prince (1979)

Prince recorded the album in just a few weeks after Warner Bros. asked for a follow-up to his 1978 debut, For You.
-Wikipedia

i mean in 1979 music was making miracles everyday! so albums like this were common. now had this came out in 2015 in this condition idda slapped [5 stars] on it just for going against the grain for what is called music now. how does it rank 37 years later? [4 stars]. first three cuts kilt and still kill dance floors to this day:

“With You” proves that he can craft a great ballad. “Bambi” was a display of guitar mastery. “I Feel For You” turned out to be a massive pop hit. and Kanye’s Big Brother with the “Gonna be Lonely” sample (or at least the first draft b4 Prince ixnayed it) ups the value in my head.

-Questlove

I really thought that When You Were Mine was on this for some reason, I totally spaced that it's actually on Dirty Mind.

I Wanna Be Your Lover is such a perfect song. I'm only a few tracks past it, but this already sounds a lot more composed than his debut. 

"I Feel For You" was recorded by Chaka Khan in 1984 and won Prince a songwriting Grammy.

You also may notice quotes from Questlove continuously popping up...he did an album-by-album ranking by okayplayer and its got a lot of good stuff to share. 

[chvrchbarrel]

There are certainly some problematic areas of Bambi.

[Tweet]

Ah man here's something I can get behind.

I got Prince, Dirty Mind, and Purple Rain on wax (all originals thank you very much!). I remember 1999 being "good". I have not listened to the rest save for the singles probably. This will always make me laugh.

[krentist]

Feb 26, 2020 10:38:12 GMT -6 chvrchbarrel said:

There are certainly some problematic areas of Bambi.

Catching up now on this thread. Bambi is so good. Sexual politics have changed, inarguably for the better, since the time this song came out. But I hope we still have transgressively horny songs in our future, so long as they don't glorify abusive behaviors. Most people are perverts. No reason for art to pretend otherwise.

The biggest issue I have with Bambi is that he's wrong. By any objective measure from the litany of data on the subject, women get more pleasure from same-sex encounters. Step it up, boys.

I hope you enjoyed this unexpectedly Freudian post on your Saturday morning. I'm now ready to be apprehended by the horny police, if it must be so.

siri send tweet.

[teekoh]

In general this record didn’t grab me as much. The opening run is really good, but I found myself spacing out as it went on.

[Tweet]

The first time I heard a Prince song live was on June 6, 2019. It was not performed by the Purple One who had unfortunately been dead for years by then. It was “When You Were Mine” and performed by Eels.

It was not better than the original, but it did hit me in some feelings I’d never felt about a Prince song before. At the time I wouldn’t have considered it my favorite song of his, but listening in a bit deeper, it didn’t seem as much about being a breakup, but rather the feeling of a breakup. The hooks made that happen. They force you to feel something. In spite of the words, you still dance to it. You feel something.

How do you not dance to Prince in some way when he comes on? For most of us I imagine its at least a move I call “The White Man’s Headbob”, and if you’re feeling frisky like me you can sometimes add a shoulder shimmy to it. That of course ignores all the dance moves you secretly wish you can pull off in the club. Dirty Mind gives you hope that someday you too can open up your hips enough to do so.

Perhaps there’s no greater proof of that than the song “Head”, the second song of side B of the rekkid. Head, as some of you may know, is slang for oral sex. I ask you, who among us is not a fan of receiving (and maybe giving!) that? Prince sure was, and its written that way. He plays all the instruments, and wants you to fuck along with him (especially on “Head’s” pulsing bass line throughout). It feels like Prince was starting to become, well, Prince on this album.

What’s most striking though is the ending of the final track “Partyup”. Over and over he repeats the line “We don’t wanna fight know more”. I don’t know if we’d ever consider Prince an overt political artist, but at the dawn of the Reagan era there is no way that line does not have a political bent, consciously or subconsciously. At just over a half hour, the end of the sprint coupled with that line leaves you with some rhetorical questions. How tired can you ever be? How often do you think about giving up? How often do you keep going? For Prince, the whole world would soon find out.